Logistics.com Inc. of Burlington, MA. has announced the availability of a collection of LEMA standards in its 'Logistics Event Management Architecture' which enable shippers and carriers to buy, sell, manage and optimize transportation services over land, air and ocean. The company has developed LEMA as an open, standards-based and user-driven architecture to empower a more seamless flow of information among supply chain and logistics community members as well as adjacent industry participants such as providers of information technology and services. LEMA has three primary benefits: intra- and inter-enterprise application integration, free flow of information, and the reduction of cycle time in processing logistics events such as simultaneous offer and acceptance of shipment moves. Logistics.com developed TransportationXML (tXML) in conjunction with customers to enable standard application integration among all members of a logistics chain as well as intra-enterprise requirements between legacy and new systems. Logistics chain members include shippers, carriers, consignees, suppliers, third-party logistics providers (3PLs) and other vendors. The backbone of LEMA is its message bus, which seamlessly integrates with over 70 distinct external business protocols such as EDI, HTTP, SOAP, XML/RPC and XML over the web. This standardization dramatically reduces the cost and risk of intra- and inter-enterprise application integration and enables the free flow of information versus custom integration. One immediate benefit of LEMA adoption is the elimination of high initial set-up fees and on-going interface maintenance fees associated with each interface between enterprises or applications. Transactional tXML most closely mimics today's business processes provided for in current transportation technology: shipments, orders, payments and tracking messages make up the list of transactional messages. Being a superset of the existing EDI documents, the tXML is fully backwards compatible with their EDI counterparts. However, transactional tXML provides additional context during processing and content flexibility. Logistics.com's LEMA standards are available to its customers and any other company wishing to reap the benefits of an open and standard business platform. The company is now seeking to expand LEMA participation through the endorsement of the standards bodies."

tXML description: "Transportation XML (tXML) defines the system interfaces to the application components, which comprise the OptiManage, OptiBid and OptiYield product solutions. These interfaces and data flows are the details that define the larger business processes between shippers and carriers that include management, procurement and optimization of transportation services. In short, tXML provides the transactional and base data support for Logistics.com's technology. tXML is a customer driven and adopted standard language that allows multiple business process components to publish and subscribe to various logistics events. Unlike other XML standards developed in committees, we worked with a select number of customers defining the business processes associated with the tXML message set. This assured quick maturity of the standard and assured its adoption by our customers. The tXML interfaces can be categorized into three areas: transactional, new business process and base data. Transactional tXML: shipments, orders, payments and tracking messages make up the list of transactional messages. New business process: examples of new tXML messages are documents exchanged between shippers and carriers to match capacity. Base data tXML interfaces provide an easy mechanism for shippers and carriers to update their working data. Maintaining a common vocabulary allows conversations between business partners to flow easily..."